NEWS AND BLOG

Planned as a trial stream, presented at SAP CX Live Barcelona, catering to the demand of single-page storefronts for commerce. Spartacus is a lean, angular-based JavaScript storefront for SAP Commerce Cloud. Its extendable, progressive and the best part is that its Open Source. It is part of a new journey towards a customisable and upgradable technology for SAP Commerce Cloud installations.

What does it do?

Spartacus talks to SAP Commerce Cloud exclusively through the Commerce REST API. Being in an initial phase it still provides most of the core functionalities of the SAP Marketing storefront. There are regular updates on Spartacus and the official release is expected in the first quarter of 2019. This Angular storefront is supposed to replace JSP-based Accelerator in future. The key point of the solution is that the new storefront is no longer part of the e-commerce platform. Being decoupled means that you can upgrade both the platform and the storefront code separately without the need to rewrite the templates, because the API interfaces will be the same.

Architecture

Spartacus has a decoupled architecture that means the storefront itself act as a separate entity which on top of its OOTB features can have custom features. It interacts through REST API with SAP Commerce Cloud or any other SAP, or non-SAP, tool which makes it an independent framework. It means that front-end developers no longer have to interact with the backend technology. The only interaction they need is through web service layer which makes development, testing and deployment of an individual platform much easier.

As for now Spartacus is based on the following technology stack:

Angular 6.1.8, TypeScript 2.9, and Sass 3

RxJS 6.3.3, Ngrx 6.1, and Bootstrap 3.2.2

Jasmine, Karma and Protactor

Github, webpack and npm

Storefront Feature

Spartacus will include features such as:

Home page

Product Search

Product Categories

Product details

A Cart page

Adding to cart feature

Order Checkout

Order history

Download and Installation

To get up and running with Spartacus, the simplest approach is to build the application from ready-made libraries. We can also clone and build from source. Spartacus currently can only be used with a SAP Commerce Cloud instance through Commerce APIs. In the future, we will be able to use Spartacus with a mock server.

Conclusion

The importance of a Single Page Application along with a Progressive Web App is immense, in terms of speed, running app without internet, etc. SAP getting rid of the older, JSP based storefront and replacing it with Spartacus shows its importance. Spartacus looks extremely encouraging, even in its initial form. Obviously, numerous things will change until the point that it is released in the steady state.

By Kapil Verma

Kapil has recently joined AgilityWorks as an Associate Consultant working within the Tech Dev Team. He loves to discover new emerging technologies and simplify existing complex solutions. Kapil enjoys exploring new places & cooking in his spare time.